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Briefing
Jan 29th 2022 edition

A question the size of an army

What are Vladimir Putin’s military intentions

in Ukraine?
Only he can say

Jan 29th 2022

battalion tactical group (btg) is a Russian army unit which

A consists of 800 or so troops, sometimes rather more, and most of
the armour, artillery and air defences they need in order to fight.
When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014, stirring up separatism among
Russian speakers in Donbas, at the eastern end of the country, and
annexing Crimea, it did so with perhaps half a dozen btgs. The
following year, when its surrogates in Donbas needed help, it
responded with roughly ten btgs.

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There are now 56 Russian btgs on or near Ukraine’s border, according

to its government. Other estimates put the number above 70. It is by
far the largest concentration of military force seen in Europe since the
end of the cold war. And only Vladimir Putin can say how, or if, it will
be put to use.

When President Joe Biden said, on January 19th, that he thought

Vladimir Putin was going to invade Ukraine, the reason he offered was
simply “he has to do something”. Huge clouds of smoke betoken fire;
mobilisations have momentum. But the fact that Mr Biden thinks his
Russian counterpart, having gone this far, must go further, does not
mean Mr Putin agrees. Mr Putin comes from a political culture very
unlike Mr Biden’s, one where negotiations often start with threats
rather than attempts at understanding. And he is accountable to no
one.

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Having not specified any objective or target, Mr Putin might feel able
to de-escalate in a way a leader who has to build coalitions around
courses of action would not. It is striking that, inside Russia, there
have been quite a few voices prophesying not war, but its absence—
and though the absence of war, as students of Spinoza can attest, is
not the same thing as peace, it would nevertheless entail fewer risks
for Mr Putin.

Russia is not the only place where people are unconvinced about the
imminence of battle. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has
told the public that Mr Putin’s mobilisation is a form of psychological
warfare best countered by staying calm. Years of losing soldiers in
Donbas have taught the country a certain stoicism.

But there was a marked increase in tension around January 23rd, when
various embassies started withdrawing people from Kyiv. Young
members of the middle class are making contingency plans to leave
Kyiv or to move family members out of regions where fighting looks
more likely. Official reassurance does little to help when it tips over to
absurdity. Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security and
defence council, insisted on January 25th that Russia’s troop
movements are nothing out of the ordinary and on the 26th that full-
scale invasion would be “physically impossible”. They are, and it’s not.

Mr Putin has made political capital out of armed conflict before. The
war in Chechnya which began in 1999 helped him ascend to the
presidency. The war in Georgia, in 2008, marked a new defiant anti-
nato nationalism. Seizing Crimea in 2014 was hugely popular at
home.
But he has fought shy of committing massive forces or risking
dreadful casualties, and many Russian opposition politicians,
political analysts and businesspeople think he has no interest in
changing that approach now. They suggest the mobilisation along the
border was not intended as the prelude to war, but just to generate a
sense of conflict and crisis at home, thus shoring up the regime, and
to rattle the West, exposing some of its internal tensions. Those goals
have been achieved.

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The drums of war have drowned out grumbles about inflation, the
raging pandemic and corruption. The demands Russia has made of
nato—that it abandon an open-door policy towards new members,
that it cease military activity in the countries of eastern and central
Europe and that it remove various missile systems—have brought
about high-level summitry reminiscent of cold-war superpower
stand-offs, confirming the great-power status that Russia sees as its
due.

In the Russian media nato’s rejection of these demands has shown

the alliance to be the aggressors and Mr Putin the doughty defender of
the motherland. As George Kennan, an American diplomat, put it in
1946 when sketching the basis of America’s cold-war strategy, in

Russian nationalism “conceptions of offence and defence are

inextricably confused”.
The West’s responses, including promises to supply more arms to
Ukraine, have allowed the confusion to be deepened. As Alexei
Navalny, an opposition leader who Mr Putin tried to have killed in
2020, recently wrote from jail: “Time and again the West falls into
Putin’s elementary traps...It just takes my breath away.”

This all explains why some observers in Russia see it as possible for
Mr Putin to lay his cards down and walk away from the table, reserving
the right to pick them back up at a later date. Given the risks that war

would pose for the Russian economy, the fortunes of Mr Putin’s

coterie and the mood of the people, they think he would be mad not
to. But that does not mean he will. His personal calculus may be
different from theirs. He is becoming increasingly isolated and may
be ill-informed on some things, such as the economic impacts to be
expected. He may have lost sight of the big picture—or he may think
he sees a bigger picture than anyone else.

Part of the picture is that when in 2014 there was a widely discussed
plan to carve out the whole of the Russian-speaking south and east of
Ukraine Mr Putin turned it down. Control of Crimea and a
destabilising insurgency in Donbas seemed like a good enough result.
The Minsk agreements, which were aimed at bringing about a
ceasefire, required a new federal role for the country’s regions. That
would have allowed separatists in Donbas to hobble any Westward
drift on the part of the country as a whole.

But the Minsk agreements are moribund and Ukraine has remained a
unitary state. Although it has not moved towards formal nato
membership during the subsequent eight years, it has benefited a lot
from Western assistance, military and otherwise, which looks set to
continue.
An independent Orthodox Slavic country that is part of the Western
project is a direct affront to Mr Putin’s model of an authoritarian
Russia; if that affront is to be avoided, Ukraine must be kept in
subaltern turmoil, weak and cowed. And although Ukraine is less
vulnerable today than it was in 2014, it looks unlikely that it will ever
again be as vulnerable as it is today. That is an argument for changing
the run of play as soon as possible. So is the fact that Russia currently
has an impressive war chest, the better to ride out sanctions.

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There is also an argument from self-preservation. Russian leaders

routinely conflate enemies at home with his enemies abroad. A
Western plot to destroy Russia which uses both “foreign agents” at
home and catspaws abroad (the role allocated to Ukraine) allows Mr
Putin to portray himself as the resolute leader of an embattled Russia.
This is self-serving but it may also, in its way, be sincere. To quote
Kennan again, Russian leaders “have no difficulty making themselves
believe what they find is comforting and convenient to believe”. And
though it is not exactly comforting, Mr Putin may believe that his
enemies within mean America and its allies are actively attempting to
get rid of him.

In an abc News programme aired on March 17th 2021 Mr Biden agreed

with his interviewer’s assertion that Mr Putin was “a killer”. Referring
to evidence from American intelligence that Russia had sought to
interfere in America’s elections, he said that Mr Putin would “pay a
price” as a result. Mr Putin may have seen this as a direct threat.
People who know the president say he is obsessed with his own
security and assassination attempts. Months spent in a bunker
isolating himself from covid-19 may well have added to this sense of
paranoia.

Two days after Mr Biden’s remarks, Mr Putin and Sergei Shoigu, his
defence minister for the past decade, went away for a weekend. When
they returned Russia started assembling troops on the Ukrainian
border and in Crimea. Less than a month later, Mr Putin published an
essay about the historic links between Russia and Ukraine which
concluded that Ukraine was no longer a sovereign state but an
American bridgehead. It is plausible that he sees an attack on Ukraine
as a defensive action, a fight for survival against America’s plot to
undermine his rule.

Not single spies, but in battalions

If Mr Putin chooses to use some or all of the forces he has at his
disposal, when is he likely to do so? The wherewithal for a major
offensive will not be fully assembled until the middle of February,
says an eastern European official familiar with the intelligence. The
Russian forces massing in Belarus—well placed for an attack on Kyiv
—are expected to reach their full complement by February 10th. That
is now tagged as the starting day for a hastily announced joint
“exercise” called “Allied Resolve”.

Mr Putin may choose to hold his fire during the Winter Olympics in
Beijing; a war in Ukraine will make good relations with China an even
higher priority than they already are. If so that would suggest a
window of opportunity between the end of the games on February
20th and the spring thaw. That said, though soft ground will make the
going tougher for Russian armour, a later attack is not impossible.

Ukraine’s paucity of air defences and the weakness of its armed forces
means that Russia could drive to Kyiv perhaps as easily as American
forces reached Baghdad in the Iraq war of 2003. Michael Kofman, an
expert on Russia’s armed forces at cna, a think-tank, thinks Russia
might go so far as to encircle Kyiv, take Odessa, a coastal city due
south of the capital and partition the country, leaving only its western
fringes unoccupied. “It would be terribly risky, and costly,” he wrote in
an essay for “War on the Rocks” a website, “but it would make Putin
the Russian leader who restored much of historical Russia, and
established a new buffer against nato.”

As the comparison with the attack on Baghdad suggests, the problem

in this scenario is what happens after Russia wins. One Russian-
backed thug has already done a midnight flit from Kyiv: Viktor
Yanukovych, when faced by revolution in 2014. There would be little
to stop a post-invasion quisling from suffering the same fate if, after
the invasion, Russia left the stage. So Russia would either have to
break up the unitary state or accept an open-ended occupation, one
which partisans from western Ukraine would flock to fight.
In 2020 rand, an American think-tank, estimated that Russia would
need 80,000 or so troops to seize and hold tracts of eastern Ukraine,
including the cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv. A larger effort that
included Kyiv would take a lot more, easily absorbing even Russia’s
substantial forces. It would not be the first great power to wade into
such a conflict on the basis of rosy assumptions about its course. But
it may see less risky ways to get what it wants.

This is one reason why Ukraine’s Centre for Defence Strategies, a

think-tank, calls a “hybrid invasion” likelier than a traditional one.
The cds says such an effort would involve cyber-attacks,
disinformation and psychological operations like bomb threats. There
have been several hundred recent bomb scares across Ukraine aimed
at schools, political offices and other non-military targets.

If, by demoralising Ukraine’s population and exhausting its security

forces, such action brought about regime change on its own, so much
the better for Mr Putin. If not, it could become the preparatory phase
for something more intense.

The report also moots an “armed escalation” in the Donbas region, of

which only 30% is currently controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Mr
which only 30% is currently controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Mr
Putin has long claimed, most recently in December, that Ukraine’s
government is committing genocide against Russian-speaking
minorities in the region. Their protection could be used as a pretext
for taking the rest of Donbas.

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On January 26th Vladimir Vasilyev, who leads United Russia, Mr

Putin’s party, in parliament, said that “Military shelling in Luhansk
and Donetsk regions is increasing, people are dying again, suffering,
their property is being destroyed…We appeal to the leadership of our
country to provide assistance to the Luhansk and Donetsk republics in
the form of supplies of military products necessary to deter
aggression, as well as to take all necessary measures to ensure the
safety of their citizens.” It is not an appeal he would have made
without being asked. If shelling were deemed an insufficient
incitement, a “false flag” operation might be put in play.

The front lines in Donbas have hardly moved in years. Breaking

through them would involve a substantial and conspicuous Russian
intervention. But it would be smaller than a drive to Kyiv, and also
possibly more acceptable to outsiders. Antony Blinken, America’s
secretary of state, has said that “a single additional Russian force
[going] into Ukraine in an aggressive way” would trigger sanctions.
But not all America’s allies can be counted on to take as hard a line,
and Mr Putin may think he is more likely to get away with expanding a
small war than starting a big one from scratch.
Despite some of these attractions, seizing the Donbas has a big
drawback. It might not work. In his essay on Russia and Ukraine Mr
Putin wrote that “Kyiv simply does not need Donbas”. That cuts both
ways. Taking Donbas might be a short-term victory, and in the context
of broader hybrid warfare it might bring down the current regime. But
in the medium to long term it would be quite likely to consolidate or
accelerate an unencumbered drive towards the West by the rest of
Ukraine.

A further possibility, which could be undertaken alongside another or

on its own, would be for Mr Putin to use the forces he has moved into
Belarus to consolidate control over the country. Though he resents it,
Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, relies on Russia in
many ways, not least in his suppression of the widespread protest
which began as a response to his stealing an election in 2020. An
effective annexation of Belarus might not necessarily trigger
sanctions. It would leave Russia nicely positioned to go on menacing
Ukraine. And it would allow Mr Putin to pose a new level of threat to
the Suwalki gap, a narrow corridor which connects Poland to
Lithuania, and thus the three Baltic states to the rest of nato.

The insolence of office

On top of the military risks are political and economic ones. The
prospect of war is already sending the stockmarket and the rouble
tumbling. War proper, which would trigger new sanctions, would
make things a lot worse. There could be a catastrophic run on the
banks. Because accommodation with the West, where property rights
are secure, is what makes it possible for Russia’s wealthy to pass
things on to their children, lasting isolation could be very irksome for
the elite.
Russian public opinion shows signs of dissonance. The vast majority
of Russians blame America and the West for stoking tension and
provoking Russia. But despite the propaganda effort, Russians have an
increasingly positive attitude towards Ukrainians. Accustomed to
seeing themselves as victims, they see Ukraine the same way:
“America’s pawn”.

The queasiness Russians may feel at the thought of lots of Ukrainian

deaths may be one reason why the Kremlin’s militarism causes
anxiety rather than support. As Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, a
polling outfit, wrote recently, “An ordinary Russian does not want to
be held hostage to the insane course of the country's leadership; he
cares about his own life and the well-being of his relatives.” A long-
drawn-out war in which not just Ukrainians but young Russians die in
their thousands would be massively unpopular.

Hence the belief, among many in Russia, that Mr Putin would be best
advised to press no further. The problem is that Mr Putin is not
looking for advice. He will follow his own mind. 7

All of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline
"Place your bets"

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